


The Hanged Man and the Fool

by ghostchibi



Series: An Upright Four of Swords [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Nonbinary Character, One Shot Collection, Other, Post-Blind Betrayal, Pre-Blind Betrayal, basically it happens both before and after, this one is Haylen's POV to match the accompanying fics about Rhys and Danse being in Rhys's POV
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-11-16 11:02:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11251788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostchibi/pseuds/ghostchibi
Summary: The Hanged Man: sacrifice, suspensionThe Fool: beginnings, innocence, potentialVaultie isn't that much of a mystery; it's just that nobody seems to know how to understand Vaultie. Haylen wants to figure Vaultie out, and Vaultie likes it when people make an effort that way.This is the beginning of something really, really great for once, Haylen can tell.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> :V I got too attached to my originally unnamed and unspecified Sole Survivor I was using in the other set of Danse/Rhys fics, so I gave Vaultie some proper characterization
> 
> Vaultie is just Vaultie and doesn't use (or want to be called by) any pronouns, but gender-wise Vaultie is a nonbinary lady
> 
> these chapters are more like standalone mini-fics, and while for the most part they're chronological I don't write them with a specific flow in mind, so whenever inspiration strikes with a specific idea in mind I write it

There’s absolutely no way that “Vaultie” is the name of their savior in second-hand combat armor and Danse’s new recruit, but Haylen certainly isn’t going to question it. It doesn’t help that Vaultie just gives a shake of the head when Danse pauses in his introduction as he realizes he doesn’t know how to regard Vaultie.

“I’m just Vaultie,” Vaultie explains. Haylen carefully takes in all which that entails; eyes so dark they’re almost black, hair almost light enough to be the same shade as those eyes. Later, Haylen will see Vaultie viewing the reflection in the mirror and Vaultie will say something about tanning so quickly in the sun, how Vaultie’s skin seems to be impervious to sunburn and only reacts by settling into a darker tone.

“One less thing to worry about,” Vaultie will laugh, and grin at the face in the mirror reflected back.

Haylen notes the scar on Vaultie’s lip, likely the aftermath of a split lip from a punch rather than a blade. Another scar concerningly close to an eye, like Danse’s scar (and on the same side, too) except slashing at a diagonal from cheekbone to inner brow, slightly covered by a few strands loose from Vaultie’s sidecut. Vaultie’s hand keeps curling too, fingers bending in discomfort to pop joints. That actually worries Haylen, is that injury recent? Vaultie’s fingers curl again and there’s a rather audible pop of knuckles.

“I can take a look at your hand,” Haylen offers. “Is it injured?”

“Just sore,” Vaultie replies. “Gets sore whenever I use my fingers too much, it’s been this way for a while. I doubt there’s much to do for it at this point.”

Rhys almost voices his discontent when Danse calls Vaultie the newest member of Team Gladius, but he holds it down. Vaultie notices anyway, because Rhys had already been on less than stellar behavior before Danse hauled Vaultie off to go digging for supplies. Just enough time for Rhys to make an ass of himself, of course.

“It’s good to have you on the team.” Haylen extends it almost like a peace offering. Vaultie stops making a smug face at Rhys long enough to look at Haylen for a moment, but then Danse is talking again and everyone’s attention is on him again.

Vaultie seems like a rather animated person. Haylen kind of hopes for a lack of quiet in the coming days, because the last thing she wants is to be left alone to her thoughts.


	2. Chapter 2

“Hey, Scribe Haylen?”

“Yeah?”

“is it okay if I like... write in something instead of circling one?”

Haylen looks over to figure out what Vaultie is asking about, and Vaultie taps a box on the form being filled out. It’s just a basic personal info form, asking for things like name, location of origin, gender, and the like. Vaultie is specifically pointing the pen at the box asking gender, showing an “M” and “F” as options.

“What?” Haylen asks.

“Should I like, circle the ‘F’ and squeeze ‘nonbinary’ in there as well or just cross it all out and write ‘nonbinary woman’ in there, or...?”

Haylen pauses.

“I’m pretty sure that it’s just asking for what your internal organs are like,” Rhys butts out of nowhere. “Bad wording, but I’m pretty sure this is all just copied from pre-War forms.”

“I thought I left gender and sex binarism in the past,” Vaultie huffs, and taps the pen on the box hard enough to leave a bit of a dent in the paper.

“I think we’ve been to busy avoiding death to get around to fixing that,” Rhys replies dryly. He’s doing his weird thing of trying to be friendly by being contrary and argumentative, again.

“Excuses, Knight Rhys, and all of them pointless.”

All three heads swivel in mixed alarm and surprise as Danse approaches, wearing his power armor and an expression of mirth. “If there is anything notable that would be necessary for the medical staff to be aware of, write it down.”

“Is that official permission to be a smart-ass on Brotherhood documentation?” Vaultie asks, raising an eyebrow and apparently immediately ready to jump to abusing that permission. “Because I will absolutely do so, Paladin Danse.”

“Fill out the damn form,” he answers, although with a bit of amusement. “If you decide to be literal with your answers, I don’t believe Captain Cade would mind. He didn’t mind when I did it.”

Haylen’s having trouble imagining Danse scratching out boxes on forms, but Danse is older and more than likely had a time when he was younger when he took these sort of things a little bit less seriously. Vaultie’s head turns toward Haylen, and Haylen realizes that she’s being asked a question.

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“I asked what your opinion was. Y’know, since you’re a medic. Is it worth irritating the medical staff because they’re lazy with their forms?”

Haylen imagines finding Vaultie’s paperwork, seeing a scratched out box with Vaultie’s handwriting inserted instead. A somewhat defiant demand for proper recognition, one that Haylen can respect.

“I think it’ll give them a good idea that if they try anything funny with you, you won’t let it slide,” she replies.

“Oh grand, I’m always down for asserting my dominance over everyone else,” Vaultie says, and proceeds to obliterate the contents of the form box with the pen.


	3. Chapter 3

“Hey. Hey Haylen. Hey.”

Vaultie is approaching with something in hand, wrapped up in cloth. It appears to be… moving.

“Vaultie, what’s in that?” she asks with trepidation, and Vaultie struggling to keep the cloth still is only making her warier. Vaultie half-wrestles the thing into stillness long enough to hand it to Haylen, who nearly drops it when the thing immediately starts squirming again. She’s positive that it’s alive, but instead when the cloth gets knocked out of her hands she discovers a sort of motor attached to what Haylen can only describe as an appendage. There’s mechanical whirring every time it squirms, and appears to resist being held still even by the motor.

“…what is this?”

“Some sort of wiggling tentacle attached to a motor. I have no idea what it is beyond that,” Vaultie replies. “Paladin Danse told me to leave it, but an intact motor seems pretty valuable.”

“One that’s still running, too,” Haylen agrees. “Did you turn this on?”

“Yup.”

“How do you turn it off.”

“Um. Well.”

“There’s no off switch?”

“Pushing the button I used to turn it on didn’t turn it off, so, uh.”

Haylen turns the object over in her hands, avoiding a smack to the face by the appendage. There’s only a button on the side, and pushing it does nothing as Vaultie said. The thing keep whirring away as it contorts this way and that.

“I may just keep this as-is,” she says, eyeing the odd present. “It’s the strangest thing anyone has ever given me for any reason.”

“Scribe Haylen, are you stealing Brotherhood resources?” Vaultie asks with a joking raise of an eyebrow. “I would have thought better of a loyal member.”

“You gave this to me even though Paladin Danse told you not to bother with it. Are you disobeying direct orders from your commander, Initiate Vaultie?” Haylen replies with the same playful tone. Vaultie’s eyebrows both raise and are followed by a roll of the eyes.

“Someone is beating me at my own game. Boy, at I losing my touch.”


	4. Chapter 4

“I don’t expect these to be any good, really,” Vaultie admits as Vaultie shapes a lump of ground brahmin meat into a disc. “But like, burgers were one of the best things to ever exist before and I’m almost surprised that nobody’s ever tried to do this regularly.”

“The grinding of meat requires too much effort, compared to preparing cuts,” Danse explains, watching Vaultie’s hands and trying to mimic the same motions. His disc turns out much more lopsided than Vaultie’s. Rhys is getting the frying pan ready, pouring out a bit of cooking oil and spreading it with the spatula across the bottom as Vaultie and Danse shape the meat.

“Haylen, is that hot plate warmed up yet?”

“I have it as strong as possible, so this is as good as it’ll get,” she replies to Vaultie. “Does it have to be that hot?”

“Not unless we make really thick patties, but they’ll shrink a bit anyway.”

Haylen wishes the police station had a proper working stove. It would make this process easier, and wouldn’t mean they would have to sit on the ground to make their food. But it feels a bit like sitting around a campfire, albeit an electric one, especially with the flickering shadows that the lantern casts on their faces as the four of them sit in the lobby of the Cambridge police station making what Vaultie calls hamburgers.

It had been Vaultie’s idea to try something different for food. After several meals of various packaged pre-War foods supplemented with radroach, anything new at all would have been a welcome surprise. Vaultie, returning after disappearing off to god knows where, had stepped over the threshold with a backpack stuffed with ground-up brahmin meat, a hot plate, some sort of round-ish bread, and an assortment of other foods, declaring that tonight’s dinner would be something other than “old shit and roaches.” That promise was enough to make them eager enough to see what Vaultie had in mind, even though Haylen is sure than Rhys wasn’t entirely convinced Vaultie wasn’t just trying to pull a prank on them.

Still, he, like Danse and Haylen, had without complaint done exactly as Vaultie had asked. The pan is a bit warped and wobbles a bit as it’s placed on the hot plate. The patties look kind of lumpy. The plate isn’t getting much hotter, even though it’s turned all the way up.

None of them really mind.

Vaultie hands a cutting board and a kitchen knife to Haylen, who accepts them with a look of confusion.

“Good hamburgers have more than just meat and bread,” Vaultie says with a grin, and follows up the utensils with a few carrots with the leaves chopped off already. “Unfortunately we don’t have lettuce and onions and tomatoes and pickles, but sliced carrots might do some good.”

Haylen starts peeling the carrots with a nod of assent; she’s not sure if carrots are a good substitute for all the things Vaultie listed, but it’s not like she’s got a better idea of what works. At Vaultie’s instruction she chops them thin while Rhys lays the patties carefully on the oiled pan and Danse tries to fix some of his more abominable meat lumps before they hit the pan. The smell of cooking meat is so nice; Haylen finds herself breathing in deep through her nose, and she smiles at Vaultie when Vaultie gives her a knowing look.

“Rhys you asshole, you gotta flip ‘em faster.”

“Why aren’t you the one flipping them then, moron?”

The two of them are on their usual arguing again, although neither hold any venom in their insults. When the meat comes off the pan, Vaultie pointedly puts the lumpiest, ugliest looking patty on Rhys’s plate. The second one is at least a little more normal-looking.

“So hamburgers were basically meat sandwiches?” Haylen asks, after Vaultie tells the three of them to tear their bread loafs in half and put the meat between the two halves.

“Sort of. Hamburgers are a sandwich, I guess, but they’re specifically hamburgers because they’ve got hamburger in them.”

“How very illuminating.”

“You don’t have to eat yours if you don’t like what it’s called, Rhys.”

“Initiate,” Danse scolds, but Vaultie reacts with just a roll of eyes.

The carrots go on top of the patties, and apparently that finishes the whole process. The hamburgers look… well, a little less than impressive to be quite honest. The bread is uneven from being torn by hand, the meat itself isn’t even and one side of Haylen’s patty looks like it’s crumbling, the carrots are a bit greasy from the meat. And even though Vaultie half-apologizes for the quality of the food and tells them that pre-War burgers were much, much better, Haylen can only grin after her first bite.

“This tastes pretty good,” she says.

“Better than boxed salisbury and bloatfly,” Rhys chimes in.

“A filling meal as well,” Danse adds.

“Ah, well, the meat’s fresh I guess?” Vaultie replies, looking between the three. “I mean, not to ruin your good mood but these are pretty crappy compared to the real deal.”

“We should try this again, on a real stove,” Rhys says. “Or in the Prydwen mess, when the ship gets here.”

Maybe Vaultie’s right about pre-War hamburgers being better. But these ones they just made together, enjoying together like this, taste a lot better than anything Haylen’s ever eaten in her whole life.


End file.
